A watershed has been reached, a corner turned, a new chapter begun. Holders of arts degrees, you may hold your heads high once more.
You may remember the scandal of a few years ago when NYU physics prof Alan Sokal submitted a hoax paper to the journal Social Text. Sokal’s paper was a meaningless hodge-podge of post-modern jargon; Social Text happily published it, only to discover it was a hoax.
To techies, the incident was validation for their most contemptuous preconceptions about the arts and social sciences. Sorry — did I say social sciences? Clearly Sokal established they’re anything but. (Cue a thousand Nelson Muntzes: “Haw-haw!”)
Ah, karma can be sweet. Jump forward to a few years, and a few MIT grad students have cobbled together a little something of their own: an automatic computer science paper generator called SCIgen:
SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.
Say, the 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, which accepted one of the robot-written papers for presentation. (Their explanation is a turgidly-worded screed that seems to boil down to “Actually, nobody read it. And you’re a bad person if you found this amusing.”)
Artsies, you may commence sneering at will.
